How OpenXR could glue virtual reality’s fragmenting market together

Enlarge / OpenXR is like a girl reaching for a moon, or something... (credit: Khronos)

Consumer-grade virtual reality (and, to a lesser extent, augmented reality) is only a few years old, but it's already an extremely fragmented market. Wikipedia lists almost 30 distinct VR headsets released by dozens of hardware makers since 2015. Creating a game that works seamlessly with all of these headsets (and their various runtime environments) can be a headache even for the biggest studios.

OpenXR is out to change all that. With Monday's release of the OpenXR provisional specification, Khronos' open source working group wants to create a world where developers can code their VR/AR experience for a single API, with the confidence that the resulting application will work on any OpenXR-compliant headset.

"By accessing a common set of objects and functions corresponding to application life cycle, rendering, tracking, frame timing, and input, which are frustratingly different across existing vendor-specific APIs, software developers can run their applications across multiple XR systems with minimal porting effort-significantly reducing industry fragmentation," Khronos said in a statement announcing the provisional release.

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